13 August 2018 4:37 PM

Quatermass, the Pit , Suez and the maze of memory

At some point I seem to have lost a year in my life. In my zig-zagging childhood progress from one naval station to the other, living in a succession of shabby rented houses and naval married quarters (unloved structures built with the liverish bricks favoured by the Ministry of Works, which were barely distinguishable from council houses), I thought I had worked out fairly clearly what had happened when. Now I find I was mistaken and can't work out where I went wrong.

By the way, this is not a mini-misery memoir or a hard luck story. I felt completely safe and warm in all these houses. But now I have lost the innocence and contentment that allowed me to do so. These days they seem a poor reward for my father’s years of hard and often dangerous service in the wartime Navy. I can generally place events with a reasonable accuracy. Schools - my own and my brother’s - are helpful. We were in Rosyth when my sibling (aged five, so sometime in 1954 or 1955), had a chunk of brick thrown at him in the playground (the small scar lasted the rest of his life) of his state elementary school. We were in the romantically named Dartmoor village of Crapstone, (or was it the much lovelier and more isolated hamlet of Dousland?) when he was packed off (at seven, so in September of 1956) to the (now defunct and merged) preparatory boarding school which would have such a large influence on our lives. My poor mother had no real idea how such schools worked, and got him into some trouble by imagining that the thing called a ‘Tuck Box’ should be filled with chocolate bars and sweets. This was a serious mistake. I, meanwhile, was under the ferocious care of an Admiral’s daughter who ran a tiny Dame School and whose name is just beyond the edge of memory, but who had impressive cases full of her father’s medals, and a domineering parrot. Lucky me, to have had such an unconventional teacher.

I can even remember, as a series of echoes and rapid scenes, the Suez crisis of 1956, which reached its height in the weeks immediately after my fifth birthday. The word must have been everywhere, on the brown Bakelite wireless with its frayed flex, that moved from room to room, in the newspapers whose headlines I could by then read. I can clearly recall my mother teaching me to do this, using the method now known as ‘synthetic phonics’ and a foxed copy of the a 20-year old ‘Tiger Tim Annual’, in a friend’s attic. The first words I consciously read were ‘They meant well’. It was when I cracked the word ‘meant’ that I realised I could read.

But I did not then understand that Suez meant the End of the World, at least as far as middle-ranking career naval officers in their late 40s such as my father were concerned. The great worldwide Royal Navy, as it had been, was finished, and would in future be far smaller, and he was suddenly on the beach, looking for work. I was merrily unaware of all this, which took about two years to strike home and must have caused my parents a hundred sleepless nights and fretful days. I was absorbed in my first proper school, also now defunct.

It was just about when we said farewell to Devon and the Navy that I remember being strictly forbidden to come downstairs and watch (on our tiny Murphy TV set that took five minutes to warm up) a BBC drama called ‘Quatermass and the Pit’. I think there must have been quite a lot of chat about this. I was seven years old and recall being apprehended halfway down the stairs, trying to get a glimpse of the forbidden horror. This, I know for certain, was shown in six episodes in December 1958 and January 1959. So I know equally certainly which house we were living in, the one with the abandoned hen house, the conservatory where I used to play war games with my Dinky Toys in the warm and dry while the Atlantic gales lashed the panes with solid packets of water (such weather we had down there!) and with the mysterious locked bedroom on the first floor which of course I learned how to get into.

My parents were quite right to keep me away from Quatermass. I have just now, almost 60 years after it was broadcast, watched this extraordinary series on the BBC iPlayer. It still has the power to frighten, and heaven knows what a small boy would have made of it.

It’s also enjoyably subversive and satirical – the noble Professor Quatermass is pitted against a bone-headed colonel, obsessed with the Germans and the last war, and a blustering, empty-headed and cowardly Tory War Minister, neither of whom can cope with the astonishing discovery of an alien spaceship five million years old, in an excavation in Knightsbridge.

Conscript soldiers, forced to perform their duties next to this scene of terror, make biting remarks about their superiors’ belief in using ‘psychology’ to keep them in line, and realise quickly that the men in charge have no idea what is going on and are ‘in a bewilderment’, an expression I haven’t heard for decades, if ever. One of the calmest and most effective of the scientists is, by the way, a young woman. So much for the alleged ‘misogyny’ of the era.

There are wonderful glimpses (accidental survivals, never intended to be interesting) of what was then the modern present – an aggressively gum-chewing Teddy Boy and Teddy Girl, a pub with (unusually for then ) a TV set in it, (everyone laughs when it goes on the blink, as they always used to do in those days), bulbous cars and lorries, London taxis with that open slot in the front next to the driver where the luggage used to go, (that type also had tiny blue-tinted rear windows, for a reason I could never fathom).

And there were old things as well, now disappeared, the individually painted shop fronts, *three* London evening newspapers (actually a fourth is invented for the drama, but this didn’t seem unreasonable), each with many editions. One of my favourite bits concerns an old couple who had long lived next to the site, and recalled being troubled by ‘ghosts’ 30 years before. They have to leave their old home and stay with a friend who is some sort of fortune-teller, reads tea-leaves and haughtily dismisses Professor Quatermass as a ‘sceptic’. By the end of the series Quatermass has both seen real ghosts and explained them as part of the material universe, along with a great deal more. But we do not hear again from the fortune-teller or the old couple.

And that is where my clock seems to go wrong. If Quatermass was broadcast in the winter of 1958 and 1959, which it definitely was, my careful calculations of where I lived and where I went to school (which also depend on an especially beautiful summer having happened in England in 1959) don’t work properly. Everything’s a year out. So much for memory, in general and particular. I wouldn’t convict anyone on anyone’s memory of 60 years ago.

Many, many years later, Nigel Kneale, the genius who invented Quatermass, penned a new series in which the aged professor rescues the world once again, from the miserable decay of the 1960s and 1970s. I’d like to see it again, as I thought it both clever and moving (books, in his horrible future, were no longer read but had become fuel in an age without coal or oil, an even nastier twist on Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451). It was full of the same questioning and rather lyrical spirit of the 1958-9 original. I was interested and unsurprised, when, some years later I found Kneale had been married to the equally admirable Judith Kerr ( who I once had the great privilege of meeting), the author of both ‘The Tiger Who came to Tea’ and ‘When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit’, a marvellous chronicler of the real nature of our time, who is also a natural storyteller. How lucky we have been to have them among us.

Comments

David Taylor
I asked and he does. I couldn't remember the name, but when he shew me a clip I do remember having seen it on TV. Memory evoked.
That would have been after I had moved to my then Aunt's, who become mum, although I would remember the westerns, relayed in by BRW TV. rented.
Both loved westerns.
We looked up " The Searchers and it was a 1956 film. That is one of my all time favourite films from that time, which I would have watched and still can.
Cowboys and, I don't think I'll write the rest,( cultural mis-appropriation!!) but I had longish hair and I wore it in plaits and loved running about with the boys and girls on our street and around the passages, being sure not to go too hard down one as the lady would come out waving her stick! Had to be educated on the sounds it made for her indoors as we were in semi!
It was, "Greyfriars Bobby", Lassie, Little Women, anything with Katherine Hepburn who played Jo, Josephine March in the Little women film "The Yearling". Loved Tom and Jerry and Flintstones.
Anything pirate, a swashbuckler, about Highwaymen. Loved reading Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's' Travels. I guess It would be classed as a gender neutral childhood, though through the old boyish jeans and jumpers, needed for making den and rough and tumble play, a girl who like pretty and stories of love and romance. Anything historical, thanks to mum.
I do remember how we made our own props, grabbed stuff from our house and old airing horse, one of which had burn marks, after an indiscretion of my sibling's doing!
Young fell off coal bunkers, plenty of grazed knees. Groaned if we had to go to the shop on an errand, but had to anyway!

Your hubby may also remember another TV programme from around that time , which I thought was a comedy but may well have been a Panorama type documentary forecasting the state of Britain in the New Millennium , the programme was called F Troop

My post went the way of the moderator. Not sure why. Personal maybe.
Staggered bedtimes were normal and my husband thinks he would have viewed the later showings.
His parents wouldn't have let him see Quatermass for his age the first time round and I can't remember seeing it.
William Tell and Robin Hood I did see at my grandma's. One episode of Robin Hood with the men on horseback Viking Helmets and no faces, gave me a nightmare.
I dreamt they were coming along the landing.
I still hate that sight of faceless horseman, remember it, but it was one thing in an otherwise safe childhood.
Saturday Football scores, that voice, wrestling was really over the top and obviously so to a young person,Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks, sitting with grandad on the table top, covered in a chenille tablecloth, sharing cheese and biscuits and him cutting slices of apple with his penknife.
Having watched the clips of "The Woodentops" and "Tales of the Riverbank" which was ,"Watch with Mother" then finding "Torchy the Battery Boy", it makes you very aware of the comparisons of not so gentle stuff today.
The best of times.
"Boots and Saddles is hubby's first memory. His nan was a cleaner at the cinema and his memories are of Saturday Morning pictures, which I didn't go to.
He reminded me of, "Sparky" the original on the radio. Children's favourites. Puff The Magic Dragon. Terry Scott, "My brother" and the song I can't remember the title of about "Running Bear and Little White Dove"

Quatermass was uniquely scary because the action was all local. The aliens, or whatever, hadn't landed in some remote American farmland like many films of the time, they were in, say, the tube station just down the road. ;

I read somewhere on the internet (it was, ahem, Wikipedia) that the series was repeated the following winter (December and January again, from memory) but in the form of two 90 minute broadcasts. I am not sure whether PH has lost a calendar year and has events in his memory with nowhere to fit them in or he has found a year which is superfluous because everything has already been sorted out into other years.

I often try to refresh my memories and put them in the correct years. One was when we moved from a council estate to a semi in a pleasant tree-lined road. I am told it was 1967 but it may have been the following year. I was still in primary school and started grammar school in September 1969 (I remember seeing the sixth-formers and prefects lined up on the first day and they all (or nearly all) had longish hair.) I remember the announcement on the television news of Attlee's death (I asked my parents who he was) and I think that was late in 1967. On the day we moved I played in a football match for the school because I remember the teacher (a former tank driver in the War) dropping us off (my brother was with me) at the top of our new road. We had only lost 4-0, which was pretty good for us as we usually let in double figures. The only school we used to (narrowly) beat was the polite little CofE on up the road in Chislehurst (that is, even more polite than us).

It isn't easy to be sure. We were in the new house while the Biafra war has happening as I remember the famine coming up in conversation during the walk home (in a children's joke I am afraid). Wikipedia tells me that it started in 1967 but it seems to have dragged on. I remember reading about it in the newspaper and the accompanying map with Port Harcourt on it. I think this was at the start. Some very violent scenes were broadcast on the television, which would not happen nowadays, and they are etched into my memory. I also remember isolated shots of American artillery in action in Vietnam but I think that may have been earlier, in the old house. Da-Nang is one of the places they reported on. Even then it was clear that things were not going as they should.

My husband remembers the first thing he saw, when they first had the television.which was ,"Boots and Saddles".
He like Quatermass, which was more of a boy thing, but he thinks it was in the 60's, becuase he can't remember seeing it so early. it's the kind of thing he would certainly watch when it comes on TV. I wouldn't sit down and watch it all, he might call me in to watch bits. It's a gender thing I think.
Thanks to this article, we did take a trip down memory lane. For me it was The Woodentops and Tales of the Riverbank, the original. Plus Ivor the engine, the original one. I think it was on at teatime.
I always loved Torchy the battery boy and remember the theme tune and he found it on the net for me. i watched old clips of Andy Pandy and the flowerpot men.
I can remember the day the TV was put in. I watched the test card and waited for the silver horse with knight in armour, carrying the Anglia banner.
i can remember vividly my grandma's, brownish toned house. The wallpaper pattern in the front room, but not the back. It had 3 bedrooms and a little bathroom, although I can remember washes by the fire.
My bedroom had a mirror with a painted lady in crinoline, with parasol and a flower arch in one corner.
After my grandma died I moved to a 3 bedroom home, but one was the bathroom and shared a bedroom. The bath had been under the counter in the kitchen. I'd have to hunt up grandma's death certificate which I have but it was early 60's.
War had changed the path of her life. Both she and my step grandad visited their respective partners in mental hospitals. His not through war like her husband, but his quite ill and no one thought she would come out again. Less hope then.
Her daughter, my mother was badly affected by the effects war had on her father.
So my grandma, took me on, visiting her husband, her daughter and, not until years later did I realise the strength she had as she also was looking after me and suffering from terminal cancer.
When I got married years after my grandma died, my step grandad and his wife, who with advances in medicine/treatment came home and saw me married. I used to visit them in my dinner break and she, like a little sparrow she was so slight would make me lovely simple lunches.
What a wonderful time to be 5, with no hint of access to child abuse images, or pornographic ones. or anxiety about perfectionist looks, or the weight of the worries in the adults lives who looked after me.
To the commentator about moving on from war. We do but it always leaves a thread running through.
If I hadn't have moved. I doubt I would have met my husband. Life is a funny thing.

The humiliation that followed with astonishing speed at the failure of the Suez adventure must have been a sudden death of the illusion that the old 'Establishment' had been living with. No wonder Winston Churchill held out as long as he could as Prime Minister until April 1955 knowing that his, who regarded himself as 'the heir apparent' expected successor, Sir Anthony Eden wasn't really up to it ; as it happened, Eden lasted barely 18 months. But never mind, a new era was awakening, the foolish Party was able to pursue with vigour it's liberal, more Left than Conservative agenda that many of them had been waiting for since the Party's huge defeat in the post WW2 General Election.

Moltmann once said when a writer talks about the end of the world, they mean the end of their world.
Plenty of people had family in the navy, but they moved on. Wars are horrific but simplistic, as are empires. My grandfathers went through much worse atrocities than your family, but they don't go on about it for nasty, political, and propagandist reasons; they get on with life.

As a Sherman (and a few years your junior), this is new to me. But I confirmed that it's on YouTube (what isn't?), so I look forward to sampling it. Agreed on how enjoyable this trip down the memory hole was, thank you. One question: where was your brother's scar? Having watched dozens of interviews with him (several jointly held with you), I can't place it.

***PH writes: the scar was a very small white mark just next to one of his eyebrows (please don't ask me which) . You'd have had to look for it and TV make-up would have concealed it. ****

Such wonderful memories Hitchens, as are mine of my childhood; carefree, safe & without a worry in the world.
A time of seeing my late Granddad going to play darts twice a week (Tuesday & Thursday) & to his wine club on a Wednesday, & then sitting at the dining table doing the club accounts.
A time of being taken to watch Walthamstow Avenue FC - later to become Dagenham & Redbridge - play at home on a Saturday next to the Unigate depot (Whatever happened to Unigate?), & then - if I was lucky he'd take me to see the Orient if he could afford it - then playing in the old Division 2.
A time of Bagpuss on BBC 1on a Sunday morning followed by a programme called Asian Magazine & then a bit later taking our dog for a walk over the local park, in & amongst all of the Sunday league football teams playing. Police 5 with Shaw Taylor followed by Weekend World with Brian Walden; the distinctive music from a song called "Nantucket Sleigh Ride" by a band called Mountain would be on TV when we got back alongside the evocative smell of my Nan's Sunday dinner cooking in the oven.
And maybe once or twice a year we'd visit my granddad's parents in a rustic Flintstone cottage near West Meon in Hampshire; with its iron range keeping the cottage warm & the coal bunker in the back garden - which seemed endless when I was young.
Yes, wonderful days!

I don't suppose it would do for us all to like or be attracked towards the same kinds of stories or people would it?

Science fiction never quite did it for me. On the other hand, Hugo, the ventriloquist's dummy who appeared in the 1945 movie 'Dead of Night' was much more fascinating and appealing to me. He was, or might have been, the alter ego to Ray Alan's magnificent character the monocled and perpetually sozzled, upper-class dummy Lord Charles.

Career politicians aside, Ray Alan was, in my opinion, the best ventriloquist I have ever seen in my life, while neither Lord Charles or Hugo would look out of place today as Jean-Claude Juncker's chief political advisor.

Now I found and read your article The Gentle Ghosts of Cedarwood: Peter Hitchens returns to his boyhood home (19 July 2010) – a very evocative and warm piece of precious memory from the past.

However, it made me also wonder why you wrote that your memory of the house was from ‘1961’ in the article while it was mentioned in the radio programme (The house I Grew Up In (BBC Radio 4, 19 July 2010) that it was 1959 your parents bought a house and you spend New Year’s Eve there in 1959 ?

“But the house itself stood pretty much as I remembered it from - was it 1961? I think it was. It was even still called Cedarwood.
In fact I know it was 1961, because Fiona, the very kind person who agreed to let me and the BBC trample all over her beautifully kept home and garden, had got hold of the old deeds from the time. “
“Here was the room where I first heard the words 'the Sixties' come burbling from our spindly, bulbous Murphy TV set…”

Now we know that the Quatermass and the Pit was repeated in 1960 thanks to the contributors. So it might be possible that your memory of Quatermass -
the TV programme you never watched (as a child) – was from the beginning of 1960 when you happily lived in Cedarwood with your family. And you were probably nine-year-old then...

What do you think about this theory? Does it make any sense regarding your other memories?

PH: *** "Many, many years later, Nigel Kneale, the genius who invented Quatermass, penned a new series in which the aged professor rescues the world once again, from the miserable decay of the 1960s and 1970s" ***

It is surprising the things that do stick clearly in ones memory from 50 + years ago ,
other things simply become vague or lost .
If Mr Hitchens retired would he move to a seaside location , I wonder .
A good story stands up over time , even if televised or filmed , so long as they are not mucked about with to much .
I remember later versions of Quatermass , with Brian Donlevy , who I liked as an actor but thought it odd He was in a British programme , in at least one and Andrew Keir in another version .

I too watched Kinvig during its brief appearance. I've always cherished Kinvig's remark upon seeing giant valves gracing the interior of a flying saucer: "Valves? Of course, I knew transistors were just a passing fad." The depiction of the local council business rates officer as a hostile alien invader bent on closing Kinvig's shop hints at Kneale harbouring conservative sentiments like much of his drama.. OTOH Kinvig's loopy UFO beliefs could be a mockery of anti-tax little Englanders.

I would have been 11 when Quatermass and the Pit was first broadcast, I would have sworn I was considerably younger but obviously not, I remember that strange masochistic feeling of being terrified but unable to stop watching. I have seen the film quite a few times and, as I recall, the story is identical though I dare say the sets and special effects were better done in the film. I thought the ending was rather cruel when the biologist Rooney has to sacrifice himself to save the world.
Nigel Kneale went on to even greater things including The Stone Tapes and The Year of the Sex Olympics regarding the latter, perhaps he foresaw what reality TV would eventually become with The Live Life Show.
He also, uniquely for him I think, wrote a science fiction comedy called Kinvig. I thought this was hilarious unfortunately, very few seemed to agree with me and it was dropped after one series.

I'm trying to pinpoint when I sat watching telly with my grandma. I've just looked up Muffin the mule which was transferred to ITV in 1956-1957.
I can remember seeing Muffin the mule for a short time. I would have been 4.
Rag, Tag and Bobtail ran from 1953 to 1965.
I left my grandma's house, when I was 8 and a half and I was born in 1954.
The date and time and month of her death is imprinted in my mind, but I never remembered the year.
I remember being sent over to her friends house, her daughter was my friend. When I came back I was told she had gone to hospital and was taken to my Auntie's house, having to leave my step grandad.
In those innocent times, I was told of her death about a fortnight later, after I had got used to the idea she wasn't very well at all.
We still celebrated the nativity at school and I was chosen to play Mary. I would practice with a "crib" , a cardboard box in front of the coal fire and she dyed a sheet with a, "dolly blue bag", to cover me.
I can remember being on the stage at school.
She sat and knitted clothes for dolls, one black one white, the black one she brought to me when she picked me up from my first day at school. I used to stand next to her on a stool as she made the most wonderful coffee and walnut cake, and one with those sugared lemon and orange half segments, then lick the bowl.
Or watch her make blackberry jam after a journey to look at the bluebell woods, pick blackberries and have tea by the river.
I was ill soon after I started school and didn't go back until juniors after a spell of convalescence at home and an open air school.
Our home was filled with books and one of the older girls from over the road came and sat with me to help me read. It was Jacko the monkey.
On Saturday morning when my birth dad took me to see a relative, it would be Petula Clarke's, "Sailor", I would hear coming from next doors kitchen.

You told the interviewer that you lived in that house in Portsmouth when you were 9, 10 and 11 years old – but I think you were actually eight when your parents bought the house in Dec. 1959. So here is also a mysterious ‘one’ year gap.

Dear Mr Hitchens,
when I read this post, I remembered a radio programme called The house I Grew Up In (BBC Radio 4) and I listened again to it now the first 11min.

I was struck that you mentioned, while you were standing in the very room you spent with your family, that there was a big fat radiogram, a huge great box with a radio and a record deck, which was *the ultimate home entertainment at the time*. You remembered listening to a haunting program called Two-way Family Favorite (or something similar) before Sunday lunch. (This part was around 9 min.)

You did not talk about TV here. Your parents bought the house on the 21 Dec. 1959 and you said you remembered to spend the New Year’s Eve in the last 50’s in that house.

So my question is,
was there a TV set when the Quatermass and the Pit was broadcasted from the end of 1958 to the beginning of 1959, before you moved to the house mentioned in this radio programme?

As a Mancunian born and bred, childhood memories for me include my first viewing of a film made before my time, '23 Steps To Baker Street' with its Canalettoesque views of the mid 1950s London skyline between Waterloo Bridge and Charing Cross Station. Great British actors like Cecil Parker, characters with names like Lady Syrett and Janet Murch, innocent references to a golliwog and the descriptive nature of the script.

'Where are we now?
Just passing under Waterloo Bridge.
Festival Hall, on the left.
I never saw that. After my time.
What's it like?
Modern.
What's that noise?
Helicopter coming in to Waterloo air terminal ...

How does it look?
Is it beautiful?
Yes, yes, very beautiful.
The view, the buildingd.
You make it all so vivid.
I can almost see it!
Half past 5. The sun must be just going down ahead of us.
Any bargescoming down?
Yes. Two lots.
I know. And the river is gold now with the sun on it like that.
The barges black against the gold.
A slight wind that makes the water glitter, so that it slaps and dances against the side of the boat...'

Perhaps it was this film that would later pique my interest in many Kinks lyrics, like Waterloo Sunset, for example. Who knows?

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